Tagged: George Monbiot

At his recent Guardian blog comment, George Monbiot exclaimed that he wanted ‘his place’ at the Guardian, his turf, to be one where people could have fierce disagreements, unlike other venues.

Quite funny that was, Mr Monbiot, considering how your post was but a fierce disagreement with what someone said. But, as our skeptical lord ably reminded us— in order to fiercely disagree, there has to be an exchange! Audiatur et altera pars.

Like this:

All it took was to turn away a bit, and a certain Mr Monbiot was going off once again. His recent mission – cleansing the entire internet, of its fancied ills and hobgoblins.

It was a week back that Mr Monbiot saw ‘astroturf libertarians’ disrupting ‘democracy’ from playing out. The key here, if you wish to understand Mr. Monbiot – ‘democracy’ is but the handing down of high wisdom, from the illumined few to the plebieus commenteriat.

The Guardian recently published an article about a “limited-review” of the IPCC chairman RK Pachauri’s personal accounts by KPMG, a firm of accountants. This report had widespread play as it followed closely behind the Telegraph’s apology to RK Pachauri over its article about his business interests. For example, using conclusions and language from the report, George Monbiot went on to claim that the IPCC chairman had “no conflicts of interest“.

Background

Last November things began to go seriously wrong for the IPCC version of science. In all this, it is easy to forget how recently it was that green science, and the IPCC in particular, had a good reputation with the public for honesty and integrity. It started after a leading Indian glaciologist called VK Raina public pointed out that he disagreed with the IPCC conclusion that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away within 30 years. Raina said studies showed that at the present rate of melting, the glaciers would take hundreds of years to do so. The Indian public had previously been told that the waters from the Himalayas would dry up within their lifetimes, so this good news was published on the front pages of the newspapers.